Split Thread WWII & Appeasement

[Hans]

Henri - Logistics is important.

Well of course however......

Not to Henri - logistics and reality are completely unimportant - the key thing for him is to make statements that must be taken as fact - or he will keep repeating them.

 

[Tolls]

I think someone has played too much Axis and Allies, and assumes it bares any relationship to reality.

 

[Garrison]

Well of course however......

Not to Henri - logistics and reality are completely unimportant - the key thing for him is to make statements that must be taken as fact - or he will keep repeating them.

His sole hope is to get the last word and convince himself he silenced everyone else with the superior power of his arguments. I've concluded he won't read any of the books recommended in this thread because he already knows they will contradict his beliefs.

Oh and in addition to logistics Henri also seems to believe casualties are irrelevant.

 

[Henri McPhee]

Which shows that you aren't interested in facts, as if we needed any more evidence of that.

Only in how far the Germans advanced, how much damage they did, and how difficult it was for the Soviets to eventually drive them back. Never in terms of the Soviet Union's actually being conquered.

This has nothing to do with how far the Germans could have advanced. Fail.

And when are you going to answer my questions about Sea Lion '38?

The Russians themselves were never quite so confident that the Allies would eventually win the war as everybody seems to be on the internet. As I have said before General Alan Brooke was seriously expecting a German invasion in September 1940. I don't know how Garrison and Spitfire would have seized that situation if they had been in charge. Keep calm and carry on I suppose. As Montgomery was supposed to have said once don't try to march on Moscow:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wo...dmits-USSR-came-close-to-defeat-by-Nazis.html

11:58AM BST 05 May 2010

The Soviet Union nearly lost the war in 1941 and suffered from poor planning, according to Marshal Georgy Zhukov in the frank television interview that has been banned since it was recorded in 1966.

Zhukov, the most decorated general in the history of both Russia and the Soviet Union, admitted that Soviet generals were not confident that they could hold the German forces at the Mozhaisk defence line outside Moscow.

"Did the commanders have confidence we would hold that line of defence and be able to halt the enemy? I have to say frankly that we did not have complete certainty.

 

[jimbob]

Henri, what is it with fuel that means you think you can ignore it?

It isn't just in the logistics train to the Eastern Front, it's also in the range of aircraft to bomb the UK

 

[Garrison]

The Russians themselves were never quite so confident that the Allies would eventually win the war as everybody seems to be on the internet. As I have said before General Alan Brooke was seriously expecting a German invasion in September 1940.

Henri please try and get this, no one cares what you said before. Operation Sealion was impossible and even if Alan Brooke thought the Germans might try the British were aware it was unlikely as they happily sent tanks troops and ships to reinforce the Middle East, but hey that's merely facts, why let them get in the way of your theory. Oh and of course this has nothing to do with your claims about appeasement and the military balance in 1938.

I don't know how Garrison and Spitfire would have seized that situation if they had been in charge. Keep calm and carry on I suppose.

Well since unlike you we've actually bothered to do some research beyond frantic googling yes I suspect keeping calm and waiting for the RN to annihilate any invasion force would be the plan. Of course this is in reference to 1940, an invasion attempt in 1938 was physically impossible for all the reasons you keep ignoring.

As Montgomery was supposed to have said once don't try to march on Moscow:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wo...dmits-USSR-came-close-to-defeat-by-Nazis.html

And again you remain ignorant of the part played by the inadequate German logistics in bringing Barabarossa to a halt, but again since its clear you refuse to learn any facts about WWII what can we expect?

 

[Hans]

Economies - something Henri doesn't understand so he tries to ignore it.

 

[SpitfireIX]

The Russians themselves were never quite so confident that the Allies would eventually win the war as everybody seems to be on the internet.

[citation needed] Further, even if this is true, it could be that they simply weren't fully aware of the tenuous state of German logistics.

As I have said before General Alan Brooke was seriously expecting a German invasion in September 1940.

Just to add to what Garrison wrote, that doesn't mean that Brooke assumed such an invasion had a significant chance of success, particularly if the British were on guard against it. And I asked you how the Germans were going to mount such an operation in 1938, with no ports or air bases on the English Channel, and a much smaller army that would have already been overstretched.

I don't know how Garrison and Spitfire would have seized that situation if they had been in charge. Keep calm and carry on I suppose.

If you mean 1940, then yes, while taking precautions against an invasion in case the Germans were a) stupid enough to try one, and b) lucky enough to get any troops ashore. If you mean 1938, I would have only worried about possible commando raids against certain high-value targets, such as ports, airfields, and Buckingham Palace.

As Montgomery was supposed to have said once don't try to march on Moscow:

Non sequitur. You just implied that the German march on Moscow had a significant chance of success (for certain values of "success"; see below).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wo...dmits-USSR-came-close-to-defeat-by-Nazis.html

The article conflates losing Moscow with losing the war. Tell us, Henri, how did capturing Moscow work out for Napoleon?

 

[HansMustermann]

@Hans
The economy graph is actually somewhat misleading, although in the opposite direction than would help Henri.

Germany had a lot of economic power on paper, and had occupied a lot more from Czechoslovakia, Poland and, yes, France by the time they tangoed with Mother Russia, but they wasted A LOT of that potential.

One example is France. Well, France had aluminium factories and aeroplane factories, so they could have produced a lot of airplanes for the Luftwaffe. Well, Bauxite is refined into Aluminium by electrolysis. They literally have some big vats of molten ore, and very high electric current going through them. Well, for electricity, France would have needed coal. They actually calculated how much: 120,000 tons of coal per month. Germany gave them 4000.

The whole industry also needed logistics, and Germany wasn't letting them have enough of that either.

You can guess that France didn't produce a whole lot of airplanes. Furthermore, it ended up being not very economic either, since you had to pay the workers to mostly stand around, because most of the time they weren't getting the materials to make those airplanes. So it ended up costing a lot more to make an airplane in France.

Automobile industry is another aspect where France's industrial capacity was wasted. Especially when Germany needed rolling stock badly for the logistics, you'd think they'd make the most use of France's factories. But nope, by the end of the war, France had produced a piddly IIRC 11% of the Reich's automobiles.

Both France and the Netherlands also had a lot of shipyards. Again, mismanagement struck, with Netherlands contributing just 14% to the total shipbuilding, and France being way behind even that. If you don't give them coal and steel, they can't make many ships, can they?

Probably the biggest tragedy though was agriculture. At the same time the Nazis were drafting plans for how many Ukrainians to starve to steal their food, well, France had a lot of agriculture. So did Poland. But did I mention lack of rolling stock, because the Army was getting most of it? France produced a lot of milk, for example... which then went bad on the farm, because there wasn't enough capacity to transport it to where it was needed. Denmark had supplied Germany with a lot of beef and cattle to slaughter into beef before Hitler's autarky nonsense. Yeah, after conquering Denmark, not many trucks and trains showed up to pick those up either. Etc.

Even domestic industry was suffering from increasing lack of manpower, and being forced to use unqualified and half-starved slaves instead. It wasn't very efficient. Take for example the Type XXI electroboot submarines, the most advanced sub that Germany came up with. It turned out that using unqualified slaves to put them together, and in companies with no shipbuilding experience (hey, Albert Speer's decision) was such a crap idea, that they had MASSIVE quality issues and none went into service before the war ended.

Etc.

Basically looking at that graph and adding the circles for Germany and France gives the idea that, woot, the Third Reich had a lot more industrial capacity than the USSR. But in practice they ended up with something that was a lot less than the sum of its parts.

 

[Henri McPhee]

There is an interesting discussion about all this with somebody called Adam Tooze, whoever he is, which might have a grain of truth in it at :

http://ww2history.com/experts/Adam_Tooze/German_invasion_of_Britain

So I do think one has to understand that sense on the British part, as part of a fairly deliberately cultivated propaganda mood which is used to solidify the British position domestically and Churchill’s position in particular, to criticise the outgoing Chamberlain regime and to separate oneself from that, and of course also to establish the basis for Britain’s increasingly clamorous demands on the United States, which are absolutely crucial to the continuation of the British war effort.

LAURENCE REES: So in essence Churchill’s hyping the whole thing up?

ADAM TOOZE: Yes, I think that’s fair to say. I mean, it’s not surprising, of course, after having suffered this catastrophic defeat in strategic terms and having lost one’s major continental allies, both Poland and France, not to mention the other smaller states, in a matter of weeks. There’s no question that this is Britain’s largest strategic disaster, possibly ever in military history. So one can excuse the panic. But seen in the cold light of the data that we have available to us now, and understanding the limitations of the German war machine from the inside as we’re able to do now, it does all seem grotesquely exaggerated.

LAURENCE REES: And it also makes more understandable Hitler’s statement in the summer of 1940, when he says that the only way to defeat Great Britain is to invade the Soviet Union. Since what he’s also saying - in effect - is that realistically we’ve got no method of invading Great Britain. And actually this all makes a kind of sense doesn’t it?

 

[erwinl]

There is an interesting discussion about all this with somebody called Adam Tooze, whoever he is, which might have a grain of truth in it at :

http://ww2history.com/experts/Adam_Tooze/German_invasion_of_Britain

Henri,

Please try to appear sincere. You're really slipping.

Before this post of yours, there are a total of 13 mentions of Adam Tooze and the book he wrote in this thread. One of whom is by you.

So don't pretend you don't know who he is, or alternatively, just honestly admit now that you really don't read any answers to your posts.

 

[Tolls]

You do realise that that all agrees with what everyone has been telling you?

And, as for "Adam Tooze, whoever he is", we've been telling you to read his bloody book for the almost two years (Garrison here is the first mention of it back in July 2017).

You really should read what we write and take it on board.

ETA: ninja'ed!

 

[Garrison]

There is an interesting discussion about all this with somebody called Adam Tooze, whoever he is, which might have a grain of truth in it at :

http://ww2history.com/experts/Adam_Tooze/German_invasion_of_Britain

Okay several recent comments have begun to make me wonder if you aren't just trolling, as others have pointed out Adam Tooze and his book 'The Wages of Destruction' have been mentioned repeatedly.

Now if we are charitable and assume your memory is poor as your grasp of logistics and strategy there are two problems with your decision to quote Tooze:

1-Tooze is very clear that if Germany went to war in 1938 it would have been a disaster for Germany, so yet again you've chosen to quote someone who holds the opposite view to you.

2-Almost goes without saying but the quote is discussing 1940, after appeasement had ended and nothing to do with 1938.

 

[Hans]

He's trying harder and harder to make the discussion incoherent so everyone else will stop responding - and he 'wins'. Lets see just how silly he'll get.

 

[SpitfireIX]

In Henri's defense (Did I really just write that? ), I think he was just making a lame joke by implying that no one knows who Tooze is.

 

[Henri McPhee]

He's trying harder and harder to make the discussion incoherent so everyone else will stop responding - and he 'wins'. Lets see just how silly he'll get.

I am more inclined to agree with this opinion on the internet. The British Navy and British Army would have been sitting ducks if Germany had won the Battle of Britain in 1940. It was a close run thing even if the public and House of Commons didn't understand what was going on:

https://www.johndclare.net/wwii6.htm

In all, the RAF lost 1,173 planes and 510 pilots and gunners killed in the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe lost 1,733 planes and 3,368 airmen killed or captured. If the Luftwaffe had succeeded, Britain would have been invaded and conquered. But the RAF held out, and Britain survived.

 

[Henri McPhee]

In Henri's defense (Did I really just write that? ), I think he was just making a lame joke by implying that no one knows who Tooze is.

Not everybody agrees with Tooze:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16

British victories are foregone conclusions. The Battle of Britain was, "in retrospect, an extremely one-sided affair". The outcome of Alamein "was never in doubt". One wonders if Tooze has ever spoken to his parents about the war or to the men who fought those hard fights. They did not think the outcomes pre-determined.

 

[Garrison]

I am more inclined to agree with this opinion on the internet.

Because it props up your fact free beliefs, and again the events of 1940 have nothing to do with the situation in 1938.

Not everybody agrees with Tooze:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16

Perhaps if you read the book instead of some half-baked review you would understand why Tooze took that position, but that is apparently beyond you. Heck the previous quote you put in about losses in the BoB supports Tooze and yet this seems to have escaped your notice.

 

[Klimax]

I am more inclined to agree with this opinion on the internet. The British Navy and British Army would have been sitting ducks if Germany had won the Battle of Britain in 1940. It was a close run thing even if the public and House of Commons didn't understand what was going on:

https://www.johndclare.net/wwii6.htm

You are two years late already.

 

[lobosrul5]

I am more inclined to agree with this opinion on the internet. The British Navy and British Army would have been sitting ducks if Germany had won the Battle of Britain in 1940. It was a close run thing even if the public and House of Commons didn't understand what was going on:

https://www.johndclare.net/wwii6.htm

Want to support that in some way, specially the Royal Navy part? Germany had no really good anti-shipping airplane. The Ju-87 divebomber was not effective at all against ships that were under maneuvers, not fast warships anyways. The home fleet would've been kept up north out of range until an invasion came, then they would've blasted the **** out of the Kriegsmarine and every single transport (towed barges really) supply ship and coming over. Sure a paratrooper division or two might make it over, then what? They'd be cut off and destroyed in a few days.